Lift Failure Detection and Management System for Quadrotors

In the last decade, the use of small autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been generalized. Specially, multirotor vehicles become really popular and are being employed in several different applications and fields: military missions, agricultural processes, rescue and surveillance operations, audiovisual productions.. and even have arrived to the public at large. This entertainment approach has set some challenges still unresolved: among them, the safety of these systems.

The work presented in this paper is framed in this challenge, focusing on the multirotors systems behaviour when facing a lift problem. It has been tried to detect and manage emergency situations, being the goal to minimize as much as possible the potential damages. It started from a deep study of the main malfunctions or breakdowns affecting to the drone’s lift. This study flowed into the design and develop of a model-based algorithm able to detect this events in a fast and robust way. This failure monitor allows to effectively apply control techniques to compensate (if it is possible) the breakdown’s effects and to use passive safety methods (e.g. parachutes) to minimize the potential damages derived from a fall.

The system and techniques developed in this work were tested both in simulation and in real experiments, proving they suppose and increment in the operation’s safeness (i.e. both the own drone and the third party agents, safety methods).